How do I start accepting monero at my restaurant/store?

Question

What is the process for accepting monero at stores? I would love to start accepting Monero.

Answer 1

There are two main ways you can go:

• run your own Monero infrastructure
• use a payment processor to do it for you

The first one has you running a Monero node and wallet, and use monero RPC to manage payment ids, track incoming transactions, etc. There are early plugins for some common store software: https://github.com/monero-integrations/monerowp/releases/tag/0.1 for Woocommerce, and a work in progress for Prestashop: https://github.com/monero-integrations/monerops, both by the same author (serhack). You can also do custom integration, and you can find instructions on using the RPC at https://getmonero.org/get-started/accepting/. Likely you will need help if you go this route, and the people in #monero (Freenode IRC) will be able to give a hand should you need to.

A variant of "doing it yourself" if all payments are face to face is to use the monero GUI alone, or Kasisto (What is Kasisto?): those have a "payment tracker", in which you can generate a payment id for a customer, and scan the blockchain for incoming payments matching that payment and owed amount.

The second one requires you to pay a service provider such as https://www.coinpayments.net/ or, at some point in the (hopefully near) future, https://payb.ee to handle Monero-to-fiat conversion.